Cool URIs don’t change
November 26, 2020
It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever. If the document at that URI moves, then the old URI should become a redirect to the new. This really is Web 101 — absolute basics.
So imagine my irritation when I went to point a friend to Matt’s and my 2013 paper on whether neural-spine bifurcation is an ontogenetic character (spoiler: no), only to find that the paper no longer exists.
Wedel and Taylor (2013b: figure 15). An isolated cervical of cf. Diplodocus MOR 790 8-10-96-204 (A) compared to D. carnegii CM 84/94 C5 (B), C9 (C), and C12 (D), all scaled to the same centrum length. Actual centrum lengths are 280 mm, 372 mm, 525 mm, and 627 mm for A-D respectively. MOR 790 8-10-96-204 modified from Woodruff & Fowler (2012: figure 2B), reversed left to right for ease of comparison; D. carnegii vertebrae from Hatcher (1901: plate 3).
Well — it’s not quite that bad. I was able to go to the web-site’s home page, navigate to the relavant volume and issue, and find the new location of our paper. So it does still exist, and I was able to update my online list of publications accordingly.
But seriously — this is a really bad thing to do. How many other links might be out there to our paper? All of them are now broken. Every time someone out there follows a link to a PalArch paper — maybe wondering whether that journal would be a good match for their own work — they are going to run into a 404 that says “We can’t run our website properly and can’t be trusted with your work”.
“But Mike, we need to re-organise our site, and —” Ut! No. Let’s allow Sir Tim to explain:
We just reorganized our website to make it better.
Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.
Well, we found we had to move the files…
This is one of the lamest excuses. A lot of people don’t know that servers such as Apache give you a lot of control over a flexible relationship between the URI of an object and where a file which represents it actually is in a file system. Think of the URI space as an abstract space, perfectly organized. Then, make a mapping onto whatever reality you actually use to implement it. Then, tell your server.
If you are a responsible organization, then one of the things you are responsible for is ensuring that you don’t break inbound links. If you want to reorganize, fine — but add the redirects.
And look, I’m sorry, I really don’t want to pick on PalArch, which is an important journal. Our field really needs diamond OA journals: that is, venues where vertebrate paleontology articles are free to read and also free to authors. It’s a community-run journal that is not skimming money out of academia for shareholders, and Matt’s and my experience with their editorial handling was nothing but good. I recommend them, and will proabably publish there again (despite my current irritation). But seriously, folks.
And by the way, there are much worse offenders than PalArch. Remember Aetogate, the plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal in New Mexico that the SVP comprehensively fudged its investigation of? The documents that the SVP Ethics Committee produced, such they were, were posted on the SVP website in early 2008, and my blog-post linked to them. By July, they had moved, and I updated my links. By July 2013, they had moved again, and I updated my links again. By October 2015 they had moved for a third time: I both updated my links, and made my own copy in case they vanished. Sure enough, by February 2019 they had gone again — either moved for a fourth time or just quietly discarded. This is atrocious stewardship by the flagship society of our discipline, and they should be heartily ashamed that in 2020, anyone who wants to know what they concluded about the Aetogate affair has to go and find their documents on a third-party blog.
Seriously, people! We need to up our game on this!
Cool URIs don’t change.
[1] Why is this about URIs instead of URLs? In the end, no reason. Technically, URIs are a broader category than URLs, and include URNs. But since no-one anywhere in the universe has ever used a URN, in practice URL and URI are synonymous; and since TBL wrote his article in 1998, “URL” has clearly won the battle for hearts and minds and “URI” has diminished and gone into the West. If you like, mentally retitle the article “Cool URLs don’t change”.
Spinal cord blank diagrams, and the Field Museum Patagotitan
November 5, 2020
Here are some blank diagrams I whipped up for drawing in spinal cord pathways.
This one shows the whole cord, brainstem, thalamus, and cerebral cortex in coronal section, in cartoon form.
It’s for drawing in ascending sensory and descending motor pathways, as shown in this office hours sketch. DC-ML is dorsal column/medial lemniscus, which carries discriminative touch and conscious proprioception. ALS is anterolateral system, which carries pain, temperature, pressure, and itch. The lateral corticospinal tract carries fibers for voluntary control of major muscle groups. Each pathway differs in terms of where it decussates (crosses the midline, left-to-right and vice versa) and synapses (relays from one neuron to the next). The sensory pathways involve primary, secondary, and tertiary sensory neurons, and the motor pathways involve upper motor neurons (UMNs) and lower motor neurons (LMNs).
This one shows cross-sections of the cord at cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral levels, for drawing ascending and descending pathways and thinking about how patterns of somatotopy come to exist.
Somatotopy is the physical representation of the body in the central nervous system. A common abbreviation scheme is A-T-L for arm-trunk-leg, as shown here for ascending sensory and descending motor pathways.
Finally, this one shows the spinal cord and spinal nerve roots at four adjacent spinal levels, for tracking the specific fates of sensory and motor neurons at each spinal level.
This is particularly useful when working out the consequences of an injury, like the spinal cord hemisection (Brown-Sequard syndrome) shown here in pink. The little human figure only shows the zone in which pain and temperature sensation are lost. There would also be losses of discriminative touch, conscious proprioception, and voluntary motor control on the same side as the injury.
Finally, since we’ve had a bit of a sauropod drought lately, here are a couple of photos of the mounted cast skeleton of Patagotitan in Stanley Field Hall at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
I gotta say, this mount beats the one at the AMNH in every way, because it’s well lit and you can move all the way around it and even look down on it from above. In fact, in terms of getting to move all the way around it, get well back from it to see the whole thing at once, and even walk directly underneath it (without having to ask permission to hop the fence), it might be the best-mounted sauropod skeleton in the world. The Brachiosaurus outside is also pretty great (evidence), but it loses points because you can’t walk around it on an upstairs balcony. Every other mounted sauropod I know of is either in more cramped surroundings, or you can’t get underneath it, or is less well-lit, or some combination of the above. Am I forgetting any worthy contenders? Feel free to make your case in the comments.
Incidentally, the spinal cord of Patagotitan was something like 120 feet long, and the longest DC-ML primary sensory neurons ran all the way from tail-tip to brainstem before they synapsed, making them among the longest cells in the history of life.
A belated thank-you to Josh Matthews and the rest of the Burpee PaleoFest crew for a fun day at the FMNH back in March. I got home from that trip about 3 days before the pandemic quarantine started, so it’s waaaaay past time for me to blog about how awesome that trip was. Watch this space. UPDATE: hey, look, it only took me a third of a year this time! Link.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 